There are many ways to manage a football club effectively, and Tony Adams should try one. With two wins in 10 Premier League matches since he was promoted to succeed Harry Redknapp at Portsmouth, Adams responded to the weekend's defeat at Bolton by placing the blame on his players.

"We weren't up for the fight, we didn't turn up," he said at the Reebok Stadium, where his players were two goals down inside three minutes and ended up losing 2–1. "I had a go at them at half-time and lost my voice. I asked them at what point did they not understand when I was talking before the game about winning their one‑on‑one battles."

Adams made a habit of this sort of thing during his first experience of management with Wycombe Wanderers, where his year in charge included relegation to what used to be the fourth division. Since then he has spent time as a trainee coach with Feyenoord and Utrecht in Holland, but the attempt to broaden his horizons seems to have had little impact on his approach to the mental side of the game.

Maybe the years he spent in therapy, freeing himself from various addictions, encouraged him to place too high a value on honesty. Adams's own painfully acquired ability to face the truth does him credit, but there is a time and a place for everything, and honesty is probably not one of the most effective weapons at a manager's disposal.

Losing your voice berating a bunch of footballers staring defeat in the face may even be counter-productive, whether justified by the facts or not. But isn't that what Sir Alex Ferguson, the most successful manager in the history of English league football, does with his famous "hairdryer treatment"? In a sense, yes. But the objective truth is unlikely to be high on Ferguson's agenda at such moments. He is telling his players whatever he thinks will induce them to get him a result.

As we are seeing in the present turbulence, there are no absolute rules governing successful football management, making it hard for the directors of clubs to know which criteria to apply when seeking a new man to replace the one they just sacked. Analyse the available evidence and all you get is a set of conflicting signals.

Paul Ince started out in the approved fashion, completing his coaching badges while still a player with Swindon, managing Macclesfield and MK Dons in the lower leagues with distinction, then coming a cropper at Blackburn in the top flight. Roy Keane went in close to the top with a big club, did well for a while and then imploded, a more condensed version of the ill-fated managerial trajectory of Bryan Robson, another former Manchester United captain who started with the advantage of a marvellous reputation as a player. There is an argument that these men, and others with a similar story to tell, would have done better to serve apprenticeships as assistants to more experienced figures. That's what Everton's David Moyes did at Preston in Gary Peters' time, as did Hull's Phil Brown under Sam Allardyce at Bolton. But examine the fates of Sammy Lee and Brian Kidd, who followed the same path and failed. Even then, the greatest of partnerships — Bertie Mee and Don Howe, or Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison — don't always produce a junior partner capable of maturing into a wholly satisfactory manager in his own right. But would Glenn Hoddle still be applying his excellent football brain to the daily business of managing a club if, instead of jumping straight in as Swindon's player-manager 18 years ago, he had started with a mentor capable of smoothing out the kinks of his personality?

On this topic there is no monopoly on wisdom, nor is this solely an English (or British) disease. Managers who flourish in one environment can wither in another.

In Europe, too, managers are called coaches and that is what they do, making it easier to identify their strengths and weaknesses in the areas of tactics and motivation when transfers and other commercial business are not part of their remit.

It would help if the preparation of coaches were taken more seriously in England — as the French did getting on for 20 years ago, and look where it got them. If the proposed national football centre at Burton-on-Trent had no other purpose, that alone would be enough.

Honours demonstrate the gender gap

Chris Hoy, the rumours say, will be given a knighthood in the New Year's honours list. Well, nothing would be too good for a triple gold medal winner who provided a kind of moral leadership for the British track cycling team in Beijing. But you have to wonder about the rush to give out these things.

Why a knighthood for Hoy and not a damehood for Vicky Pendleton, Hoy's female equivalent, the winner of three world championship gold medals in the spring but restricted by gender...#8209;prejudiced rules to a mere one Olympic event? Or for Nicole Cooke, whose feats over the season were quite the equal of Hoy's?

Perhaps it would be as well to wait until the end of their careers before giving sporting heroes the extra garlands to go with their cups and medals. And some long-standing injustices might be addressed by belatedly knighting John Surtees, the only man to win world championships on two and four wheels, and the survivors of the 1966 World Cup squad.

Uplifting downhill sight in white

A change in snowfall patterns means that the European downhill skiing season no longer begins as it once did with the famous Première Neige at Val d'Isère. So on Saturday we had instead the sight of Michael Walchhofer and Bode Miller battling on the swooping Val Gardena downhill course, amid scenery which was very reassuringly covered with the genuine white stuff.

People who fall in love with skiing - or snowboarding, come to that - often develop an interest in mountain culture as a whole, and they will share my enjoyment of The Snow Tourist, a new book by my Guardian colleague Charlie English. It contains one of the best accounts I can remember of the harrowing experience of setting yourself a target - in Charlie's case, the celebrated haute route that runs from Chamonix to Zermatt - and failing to reach it. Highly recommended, whether or not it snows this week.

Understudy could be star in his own right

A happy Christmas to Dave Walder, the 30-year-old Wasps fly-half who came off the bench on Saturday to inspire his club's win over Saracens. Walder is the understudy to Danny Cipriani, who was shunted to full-back to accommodate him. Walder's previous job was at Newcastle, his hometown club, where he spent seven seasons deputising for Jonny Wilkinson, another prodigy. Somehow you suspect he is a better player than four England caps suggest.

Beckham soap opera enters its Milan chapter Victoria Beckham's impersonation of Audrey Hepburn seemed to go down well in Milan. Her husband's job is harder: impersonating the footballer he used to be.